Error: Cannot find the fakeroot binary on Arch Linux

Josh Sherman
1 min read
Linux Arch Linux

As you may already be aware, my blog is primarily a chronicle of the issues I’ve faced and how I’ve went about solving them. Switching back to Arch Linux from Debian recently, and left me with no shortage of new gotchas to document. Nothing that’s left me thinking moving back to Arch was a bad idea, but enough to keep the ol’ blog moving.

One of the first things I do after setting up and booting into an Arch Linux install for the first time, is to install a package manager that supports the Arch User Repository (AUR).

The AUR is one of my favorite things about Arch, but to use it in a tenable way, you need to install a package manager wrapper than that can properly talk to it.

For me, that package manager wrapper is yay. I’ve been using it for quite a while now, since yaourt was abandoned, or whatever the heck happened there.

To install a package from the AUR without having a helper application, you need to download the PKGBUILD file, and make the package manually. It’s not a hard process, but if I had to do that for every application I installed from the AUR, I’d probably be shopping for a new Linux distro.

So the “new to me” error this go around, while trying to install yay was receiving this error:

/tmp/yay
% makepkg -si
==> ERROR: Cannot find the fakeroot binary.

As mentioned, this was new to me, as I don’t ever remember running into this before. The reason for that, is because in previous adventures, I installed the base-devel package earlier in the process and failed to do so this time.

So to get things moving, simply install base-devel:

% pacman -S base-devel

Or, if so desired, you can install the specific packages necessary, instead of base-devel:

% sudo pacman -S binutils make gcc pkg-config fakeroot
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Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.

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